Altered Carbon: Social Splits With Critics Once Again

Netflix is taking a stab at the sci-fi market with its new series Altered Carbon, which debuted last Friday.

The show — based on the 2002 novel by Richard K. Morgan — was given a 10-episode first season and a huge budget (Netflix has kept the exact figure under wraps though it’s rumored to be well over $100 million). It involves a distant future where the human mind and consciousness are stored and transferred among physical bodies, which are essentially just empty, easily replaceable vessels. The main character is played by Joel Kinnaman, who has some experience in the sci-fi genre after his role as RoboCop in the 2014 film of the same name. He also played Republican presidential candidate Will Conway in House of Cards. Critics aren’t terribly impressed with Altered Carbon, and it has a modest 65 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. As CNN writes, “Netflix has taken more than a few flyers on big, splashy, time-wasting projects, and Altered Carbon — a sci-fi experiment gone awry — joins that pantheon of the quickly forgettable.” Non-critics totally disagree, however: The series has a 91 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and Social gives #AlteredCarbon 82 percent positives. –Alex Shultz

About 30dB

30dB is a free opinion search engine based on our ongoing analysis of social media and news. Think Google but for opinion on just about anything you’re interested in. We also produce stories like the one you’re reading covering the Internet’s opinion on events in the news. Feel free to add related topics, compare topics and even launch new searches through our live infographics all without leaving the page. You created social media, we’re giving it back to you a bit more organized.